Nature…Yes or No?

Spring is finally here and moods are spontaneously lifting. This particular soul always finds solace in nature. Being in the garden or around animals or just out there with the blue sky and the trees with birds chirping their songs. In these environments I find it the easiest to pray. I find myself stopping randomly as I am struck by God’s glory. And being in conversation with Him, the angels or the saints, is far less a chore. Rather, it is spontaneous, joyful and happy. It feels more right to pray here than almost anywhere else.

Why is this? Why is it easier to pray outside in pure nature than it is to pray in our rooms? Why do the distractions of the birds and the plants, the sun and the sky draw us closer to God rather than the distractions we get during Mass which only make it harder to unite ourselves to Him? After all, we know that He wants us to go to Mass at least each Sunday and Holy Day. We know that He is present Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Tabernacle and wants us to visit Him there.

So why is praying out in a field so effortless, and so right?

I was in a beautiful flower and herb garden recently and while sitting on a bench in the shade I began pondering this question and asking Our Lord for the answer.

It struck me that when He created us, He put us in a garden and told us to tend and care for it. We started out as farmers and husbandman. He gave us creation not only to nourish us, but as a way to recall just how much He loves and cares for us. And to remind us that as we tend the soil of the earth, we must also tend the soil of our souls.

As shocking as it sounds to our modern sensibilities, mankind survived by living off the land for literally centuries and they did quite well. Their knowledge of medicine was far greater than we care to give them credit for. Their knowledge of healing herbs and natural remedies was intense and vastly helpful. It wasn’t until the Protestant Reformation caused havoc in the medieval world, and divided religion and care for mankind and God’s creation from the rest of life’s activities, which then led to wars and deaths and ceaseless arguments, that the modern world began to unfold. Rather than continue to fight over religion and knowing full well that without an authority, namely the centuries old Catholic Church founded by Christ Himself, agreement was impossible, people decided to stop discussing religion. After all, how many of them had died due to fighting over religion? Rather than continue the slaughter, they divided religion from every facet of their lives and decided that there was truly only one thing they could agree upon.

That one thing? Making money.

This intense form of greed quickly devastated Europe as peasant lands were seized and peasant families were forced off of their land. The common lands which had been used by townsfolks for generations as grazing grounds for their livestock were confiscated and given to greedy men for their own use. Farmers were forced into cities to work in the degrading and deadly conditions of the factories. It was all about making more and more things to get more and more money to buy more and more things. Gone was the mindset possessed by mankind since the beginning, that to have enough to survive on and provide for your family in a comfortable way was enough. Now everyone wanted more of their new god, money, so they could have more stuff.

Fast forward to today through all of the isms and countless wars caused by the reformer’s thoughts which sprouted into such deadly seeds, modern man is living the life of a robot. His time is ordered according to a clock which renders him subservient to an employer who cares for him only insofar as he is a tool to make the business more money. He is locked away in a lifeless office chained to a screen which minute by minute sucks the life out of him. But ‘oh’, they say, ‘there is so much time off of work to relax and do whatever you want. We’ve made your lives so much better!’ No, most of our lives are spent either at work, getting ready for work, sleeping so we have the energy to go to work, or collapsing at night because work is so exhausting. The weekends are times when necessary duties must be fulfilled. Rarely is there a time to simply rest and truly refresh yourself from the inside out.

In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “Nothing solid can be built…upon the utterly unphilosophical philosophy of blind buying and selling; of bullying people into purchasing what they do not want; of making it badly so that they may break it and imagine they want it again; of keeping rubbish in rapid circulation like a dust-storm in a desert; and pretending that you are teaching men to hope, because you do not leave them one intelligent instant in which to despair.”

We have been robbed of our God given right to provide for ourselves, our families and our communities by working off the land and by owning our own means of support. We have been robbed of the ability to order our lives according to the seasons, to rise when the sun rises and retire when it sets. Our whole system is set up in diametric opposition to the way God created mankind and the natural world to be. I do not condemn everything in the modern world, but much of it insofar as it is opposed to the common good of each individual, I do condemn. It is time that we reclaim our birth right. This must start with self educating ourselves in solid and unshakeable truths.

For the validity of my assertions, please look into the works of the historian Brad S. Gregory. Namely his books Rebel in the Ranks and The Unintended Reformation.

To read the excerpt of the book from which the Chesterton quote was borrowed, please visit here.

Beauty of the Home

I take the principle of domesticity: the ideal house, the happy family, the holy family of history. For the moment it is only necessary to remark that it is like the church and like the republic, now chiefly assailed by those who have never known it, or by those who have failed to fulfill it. Numberless modern women have rebelled against domesticity in theory because they have never known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are driven to the workhouse without ever having known the house. Generally speaking, the cultured class is shrieking to be let out of the decent home, just as the working class is shouting to be let into it. Thus says G.K. Chesterton in What’s wrong with the world: On the Madness of Modern Ideals

What an excellent quote! Why are women fleeing the home? Why, why, why??

Well, quite simply, we have been programmed to. As I discussed here, women have been indoctrinated from the cradle with the ‘necessity’ of getting a job and making something of themselves. According to this article at Forbes, more women are now working than men. This situation is nothing more than deplorable.

Women were indeed made to ‘make something’, but not so much of or for themselves. We have an innate desire to cultivate and engender goodness, beauty and truth in others. It is our special power given to us by God and written in the very fiber of our beings. One of the best and easiest ways to do this is through our home. The home is the safe refuge for our family.

We all want a home. But are we creating a home to come to?

A Music Party by Arthur Hughes

A home isn’t just a dwelling with four walls and a roof that we stagger back to after a long day at the office rat races. It is a place that forms us and gives us our identity. It is a place that provides us with culture and heritage. It is a place that gives us peace and draws us back to its safe embrace even when we are a world away. This is not an atmosphere that can be created by merely living in a house. A house needs to become a home. This is done not only by the family living within its walls, but by their prayer life. Even by the cleanliness of the home and its décor.

The most vital part needed in the transfiguration from house to home is the woman, wife and mother. She is the heart and lifeblood of the home and the family. It is she who encourages her husband in his day to day struggle with the drudgeries of work and the toil of providing for the family. It is she who nurtures and teaches the children. It is she who decides what theme and feel the house should have with the colors of the paint on the walls and the types of furniture and décor held within its sanctuary. It is she who is careful to provide beauty in her bearing, in her teaching, in her spirituality, her comfort and in the ambience of the home.

A woman cannot give her full attention to this august and paramount endeavor if she is constantly dragged outside the castle of her home. As women, we owe it to ourselves and to our families to cut the bonds the modern world has placed upon our minds and bodies and devote ourselves to creating a true home.

If you are looking for tips on how to achieve this, these two books could be very beneficial for you: Theology of Home Finding the Eternal in the Everyday and Theology of Home II the Spiritual Art of Homemaking by Carrie Gress and Noelle Mering. Great works and much needed in our time. There is a theology to homemaking and we modern women would do well to wake and realize the truth of this and endeavor to learn how to live this theology for our families.

Women Must Work!

From the moment of our conception, we become a product of our environment. What a mother eats affects her unborn child. The lifestyle she leads either positively or negatively affects her child. The amount of stress she is under affects her child. And upon joining our family on the day of our birth, our formation as an individual has begun.

We are surrounded by women who work. Instead of the pack of protective elephants circling their young, tusks outwards to defend them, they have circled with the tusks inwards to impale them if they do not conform to the status quo.

We are incessantly informed that women need to make something of themselves. They need to be able to support themselves. They need to get a good paying job and do all they can to get promotions, more fealty from coworkers (which is really just lip service) and more pay. Always more pay. If you aren’t working, you are a leech on society. You have betrayed yourself and all those of your sex. You are a burden on your husband. If he isn’t resentful now, he most certainly will be in the future. There is no way you can prevent his resentment of you unless you cease your sedentary lifestyle and get a job! You are stealing away your family’s ability to buy a nice house and to have those extra luxuries that make us human. And you are denying your children, present and future, the necessities of life by your unforgivable selfishness! You poor backwards, unkempt, stupid, confused little thing!

I am a stay at home wife. My place is in the home. It is here I can most easily fulfill my vocation as a woman, as a wife and as a mother. I am to be the heart of the home! To provide a safe haven and a refuge for my family. A place where they can receive refreshment, light and peace. A refuge where the Faith is paramount, where culture and civilization are taught and embodied. A refuge in which to become rejuvenated after facing the onslaught of the world outside the home.

I admit that I have listened to the cacophony insisting on my working a ‘job’ from childhood and have been influenced by it more than I care to admit. I struggle greatly knowing that people are disappointed in me and that I am looked down upon. But ultimately, I am not doing this for them. I am doing this for my husband and our family. I am doing this because I feel it is the best way for our household to progress towards fulfilling our respective vocations as man and woman, husband and wife, father and mother. For us, it is the easiest way to live out the truths of the Natural Law and of our Faith.

It is difficult in today’s world where the system has duped us into ‘needing’ two incomes and in which women constantly have their hackles raised at any hint of male superiority and sexism. But why? Why must we give in to this distorted view? Women have the ability, nay the duty, to lead the hearts of men. To inspire in them the desire to work for, provide for, love and even fight for women. We have the power to inspire true chivalry, culture and manliness in men. We should work together to fulfill our respective roles. Men cannot bear children, or suckle them at the breast. Men have not the innate ability to inspire civilization with the virtues of true masculinity, chivalry and gallantry. This is given to them by the presence of women. Women who fulfill their calling. Women who strengthen their men for the toil and hard work they must endure. Women who raise little men and women to carry on the propagation of Faith and culture, beauty and chivalry.

Instead, as G.K. Chesterton put it with his penetrating wit,

“Ten thousand women marched through the streets of London saying: ‘We will not be dictated to’, and then went off to become stenographers.”

Listen to him extol the dignity of women in the home in his work What’s Wrong with the World.

There is only one way to preserve in the world that high levity and that more leisurely outlook which fulfills the old vision of universalism. That is, to permit the existence of a partly protected half of humanity; a half which the harassing industrial demand troubles indeed, but only troubles indirectly. In other words, there must be in every center of humanity one human being upon a larger plan; one who does not “give her best,” but gives her all…But she cannot be expected to endure anything like this universal duty if she is also to endure the direct cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil. Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive cook, a schoolmistress, but not a competitive schoolmistress; a house-decorator, but not a competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but not a competitive dressmaker. She should have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she, unlike the man, may develop all her second bests…Women were not kept at home in order to keep them narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at home in order to keep them broad. The world outside the home was one mass of narrowness, a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of monomaniacs. It was only by partly limiting and protecting the woman that she was enabled to play at five or six professions and so come almost as near to God as the child when he plays at a hundred trades.

Women have forfeited the beauty of home life for slavery and quite honestly, polygamy. A woman working outside the home at a 9-5 job is a slave to the whims and desires of her superiors and employer. She is not free to come and go when she chooses, nor is she able to devote her valuable time to caring for her family and providing them with the sanctuary of home. And she is in a constant battle with those others of her sex who work alongside her at these jobs. Constantly do they vie with each other for the attentions of men in higher positions who can obtain a higher position for them. Constantly do they vie with each other for the attentions of the boss, hoping that he will give them a raise or a promotion. Is this not reminiscent of the multiple wives of one man each vying for the attentions and love of their husband? Each needing to be more beautiful and needed by him?

Listen once more to Mr. Chesterton.

Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought not to do it.

Oh! How we have fallen! How we have forfeited the place Christianity won for us as Queen of the home and Mistress of our husband’s heart! How we have lost our place as the heart of the home! As she who provides the lifeblood to her household and helps her husband discern how best to lead the family! Nay, we have chosen to thrust a dagger into the heart and have created a hydra, with each head vying for supremacy. Quite contrary to this eloquent sentence in Casti Connubii

For if the man is the head, the woman is the heart, and as he occupies the chief place in ruling, so she may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.

I do not condemn women for working and I realize fully that there are times when she is forced to work because her husband is not given a just and living wage to support their family. But this does not need to be the norm. Why can’t we stand up for and fight for our elevated place in the home?

Let us hear from the beautiful and forceful Casti Connubii.

The same false teachers who try to dim the luster of conjugal faith and purity do not scruple to do away with the honorable and trusting obedience which the woman owes to the man. Many of them even go further and assert that such a subjection of one party to the other is unworthy of human dignity, that the rights of husband and wife are equal; wherefore, they boldly proclaim the emancipation of women has been or ought to be effected. This emancipation in their ideas must be threefold, in the ruling of the domestic society, in the administration of family affairs and in the rearing of the children. It must be social, economic, physiological: – physiological, that is to say, the woman is to be freed at her own good pleasure from the burdensome duties properly belonging to a wife as companion and mother (We have already said that this is not an emancipation but a crime); social, inasmuch as the wife being freed from the cares of children and family, should, to the neglect of these, be able to follow her own bent and devote herself to business and even public affairs; finally economic, whereby the woman even without the knowledge and against the wish of her husband may be at liberty to conduct and administer her own affairs, giving her attention chiefly to these rather than to children, husband and family.

This, however, is not the true emancipation of woman, nor that rational and exalted liberty which belongs to the noble office of a Christian woman and wife; it is rather the debasing of the womanly character and the dignity of motherhood, and indeed of the whole family, as a result of which the husband suffers the loss of his wife, the children of their mother, and the home and the whole family of an ever watchful guardian. More than this, this false liberty and unnatural equality with the husband is to the detriment of the woman herself, for if the woman descends from her truly regal throne to which she has been raised within the walls of the home by means of the Gospel, she will soon be reduced to the old state of slavery (if not in appearance, certainly in reality) and become as amongst the pagans the mere instrument of man.

Ite Ad Joseph!

Previously, we discussed some of the benefits of making St Joseph an important figure in our lives. Honestly though, why is this? Why Saint Joseph rather than one of the female saints? After all, we are women trying to regain our lost femininity. We are trying to regain our true selves and fulfill our vocation as women. Why should we look to a man, even if he is a saint, to help us attain this elevated state? How is it that he could be of more help to us than a woman saint?

The answer couldn’t be more simple.

St Joseph lived with Our Lady. He lived with her who chose not Eve’s path of false womanhood, but the path of true womanhood. He lived with her who not only followed the path of true womanhood, but is the perfection of womanhood. He lived with her who embodied everything that each woman is called to be in bearing and grace, in knowledge and humility, in compassion, kindness, strength, prudence and Prayer. In the quickening of the hearts of others and inspiring them to virtue, in bringing culture and civilization. In a word, in living to the full; sanity and sanctity.

Saint Joseph lived with the New Eve. He loved and served her. As her chaste spouse he witnessed her fulfill her feminine vocation unerringly. He knows more than any other person what a true woman is. He knows her demeanor and bearing, her thoughts free of the entanglements of the Fall, and the virtues she should possess. He is one heart and mind with the perfect woman!

He wills to aid us in our quest of fighting the old Eve and putting on the new. He wills that we should be true and holy women! With his intimate knowledge of the perfect woman, Our Lady, he will shape and mold us into true images of her. True Marian apparitions!

Any words of mine regarding this glorious saint are horribly inadequate. I will have to let the saints do the talking for me…

O, what pure love the virgin spouses had for each other! More than Adam and Eve in the early days of their innocence, Joseph and Mary were the delight of the Lord, the ecstasy of angels in the humble home of Nazareth. Nazareth was similar to Eden in the first days of creation: everything was holy, everything was innocent, everything was beautiful! – Blessed Bartolo Longo

He who knew the holiness, innocence and beauty of the New Eden in Nazareth, wants to aid us in regaining it. He wants to help us win back our dignity and desires this for us as much as do his holy spouse and foster Son.

Just as Mary by her motherhood of the Saviour became the mother of us all, so too does Joseph as the earthly father of Jesus and virginal spouse of Mary, become our father. He led, protected, provided for and loved Jesus and Mary, perfectly! He feels the same towards us and desires to help us if we but call upon him!

Saint Joseph, with the love and generosity with which he guarded Jesus, so too will he guard your soul, and as he defended him from Herod, so will he defend your soul from the fiercest Herod: the devil! All the care that the Patriarch St. Joseph has for Jesus, he has for you and will always help you with his patronage. He will free you from the persecution of the wicked and proud Herod, and will not allow your heart to be estranged from Jesus. Ite ad Joseph! Go to Joseph with extreme confidence, because I do not remember having asked anything from St. Joseph, without having obtained it readily. – St Pio of Pietrelcina

Give yourself to him as a loving child, confident that he will work great wonders in your soul and lead you safely to authentic feminine regeneration and ultimately to Heaven. Ite ad Joseph, dear friends!

An Aid to Reclamation

In our efforts to regain our true femininity, it is safe to say we need all the help we can get. After all, the ways in which we could take a wrong turn on our quest are myriad and often cleverly concealed as beneficial.

What is another step we could take that will help guarantee our transformation from disfigured little Eve’s to true women imaging the New Eve?

This step is not a what. It is a who.

He lived with she who is grace and beauty perfected. He lived with him to whom we long to be united. He lived with, cared for, worked day and night for and loved beyond measure and beyond all telling, Our Lord himself and his Blessed Mother.

He is the great St Joseph.

St Teresa of Avila, Our Holy Mother, loved St Joseph in a special way. He cured her of a terrible illness and put her on the path towards reforming the Carmelite Order. It is to his protection that she entrusted each of the Carmels that she founded. She says in her earnest, witty and delightfully feisty way,

I took for my patron and lord the glorious St. Joseph, and recommended myself earnestly to him. I saw clearly that both out of this my present trouble, and out of others of greater importance, relating to my honour and the loss of my soul, this my father and lord delivered me, and rendered me greater services than I knew how to ask for. I cannot call to mind that I have ever asked him at any time for anything which he has not granted; and I am filled with amazement when I consider the great favours which God hath given me through this blessed Saint; the dangers from which he hath delivered me, both of body and of soul. To other Saints, our Lord seems to have given grace to succour men in some special necessity; but to this glorious Saint, I know by experience, to help us in all: and our Lord would have us understand that as He was Himself subject to him upon earth−−for St. Joseph having the title of father, and being His guardian, could command Him−−so now in heaven He performs all his petitions. I have asked others to recommend themselves to St. Joseph, and they too know this by experience…

Would that I could persuade all men to be devout to this glorious Saint; for I know by long experience what blessings he can obtain for us from God. I have never known any one who was really devout to him, and who honoured him by particular services, who did not visibly grow more and more in virtue; for he helps in a special way those souls who commend themselves to him. It is now some years since I have always on his feast asked him for something, and I always have it. If the petition be in any way amiss, he directs it aright for my greater good.

I ask, for the love of God, that he who does not believe me will make the trial for himself−−when he will see by experience the great good that results from commending oneself to this glorious patriarch, and being devout to him. Those who give themselves to prayer should in a special manner have always a devotion to St. Joseph; for I know not how any man can think of the Queen of the angels, during the time that she suffered so much with the Infant Jesus, without giving thanks to St. Joseph for the services he rendered them then. He who cannot find any one to teach him how to pray, let him take this glorious Saint for his master, and he will not wander out of the way.

One of the greatest saints of the Church and the mistress of the contemplative life has entreated us to take St Joseph as our master and lord. How could we do otherwise but obey?

Ite Ad Joseph!

Reclaiming our Identity

How do we regain what was stolen from us? Namely, the exquisite bearing and burnished beauty of a whole and complete woman.

The first step is perhaps the hardest and the most puzzling. It is to realize that everything our culture has taught us to believe is false. The role and dignity of women has been perverted by our modern, secularized, post-Catholic culture. Views we simply take for granted—such as the belief that a woman has to work and if she chooses not to she is not only failing society in general, but damaging her own psyche and self worth—need to be uprooted from our brains. Perhaps we think they have been, but isn’t there still a part of us that cringes when we are around those ‘truly successful’ women? A part of us that wonders if we will ever match up? Hopefully you see how deeply the cancer has insinuated itself into the fibers of our being.

The good news is that it really is just a sickness. An alien part of ourselves that doesn’t belong and that the hosts of Heaven want to help us eradicate.

The best role model we have for curing this illness is the Queen of Heaven and our Mother. Why? Because she is the opposite in every way to Eve, our mother. Eve chose to become her own ‘goddess’ by trying to be like God. In reality, if she had humbled herself and followed God’s law, he would have given her a share in his glory. A goddess of sorts is what she would have become. Before you shout Heresy! please remember that St Peter says we will be ‘partakers of the divine nature’.¹ And the Catechism states rather eloquently that

“The Word became flesh to make us “partakers of the divine nature”: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God.” “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods.”²

This is indeed a high calling and a priceless gift! Yet how do we attain to this without following in Eve’s footsteps and trying to make ourselves gods or goddesses instead of partakers in the divine nature? Doing which is condemned time and again in holy writ.

One way, and a good first step towards conquering and rejecting the fallen nature of Eve, is to consecrate ourselves to Mary, the New and Perfect Eve. Do not be discouraged by the immaculate purity and insuperable perfection of Mary. She knows that we are weak daughters of Eve blindly trying to find our way back to our true dignity and she wants to help us. By consecrating ourselves to her, our queen³, we pledge ourselves more fully to her. We bind ourselves to her in a covenant of love. Father Kentenich, who spent three years in the Dachau concentration camp during World War II, promoted a method of Marian consecration he called the covenant of love. ‘He believed that a covenant of love with Mary would transform the world by turning those consecrated to her into ‘apparitions of Mary.’⁴

In other words, by uniting ourselves more fully to her and imitating her virtues, we become ‘apparitions of Mary’ for the world. Images of the Perfect Woman and Queen of Heaven. The more we become her apparition, her image, the more we will become the true women God created us to be. The more God’s glory will shine through us and draw others towards the Truth and the fulfillment of their vocations as men and as women.

1 2 Peter 1:4 RSV

2 Catechism of the Catholic Church #460

3 See the Book of Revelation 12:1 RSV

4 Excerpt from Consecration to St. Joseph by Fr Donald Calloway, MIC